Chapter 6
After several seconds, Mark’s head reappeared in the hole, looking down at them. “Heather, jump up and grab my hand so I can pull you up.”
“What about me?” Jennifer asked.
“Don’t worry,” said Mark. “Once she’s up here, Heather can hold my legs and I’ll lean down to grab your hands.”
With her rock climbing experience, Heather swung up into the opening with ease, and together they soon hauled Jennifer up as well.
They found themselves in a curved room, what must have been the entire lower deck of the ship. An odd assortment of translucent tanks and long tubes, filled with glowing, iridescent gasses, lined the walls.
The interior walls, floors, and ceilings of the craft were of a different material than the outer hull, something that felt more closely akin to plastic than metal. Here also the magenta ambient lighting left no shadows. The room was spacious in all dimensions except height, not quite two meters of space separating floor from ceiling so that Mark was forced to stoop slightly to keep from banging the top of his head.
Heather moved to the center of the room, where a circular shaft a dozen feet in diameter rose to the ceiling. An open doorway led inside. Mark moved up beside her as she peered in.
“An elevator?” Heather asked.
“Or a garbage disposal,” said Jennifer, joining them.
Mark grinned. “Doc, you’re a breath of fresh air.”
“Just pointing out that we don’t know a damn thing about this ship,” she said, arching her left eyebrow.
Mark turned back toward the opening. “Who, besides me, wants to be first to find out?”
Heather’s heart had not slowed since she had first seen the starship. Even free climbing the massive rock spire called The Needle had not pumped so much adrenaline into her bloodstream.
“It’s a little late for caution. I’m game.”
Jennifer shook her head. “I’ll wait out here, thank you. If you guys get vaporized, then at least I can tell our folks how you met your fate.”
Stepping into the shaft, Heather scanned the walls for a control panel. The walls were uniformly smooth and plain, the same material as the rest of the lower deck. Heather pressed her palm against the wall, then both palms, while Mark tapped and banged beside her. Nothing.
After several minutes of fruitlessly trying to make something happen, they stepped back out of the small cylindrical room.
“Well that was exciting,” Mark muttered.
“It looks like we’re going to have to keep hoisting ourselves up to the other decks through the same hole that got us into the ship,” Heather said.
Mark led the way upward. This time the access was much easier. All they had to do was reach up and pull themselves through the hole, although Jennifer still required a helping hand to make it.
Whereas the deck below had covered the entire lower portion of the ship, the next level found them confined to a single small room with a closed door barring exit to the remainder of the deck. The room was a dozen feet across with a curving desktop extending out from the arc of the outer wall. Positioned at equal intervals along this desk were four stools mounted in a track, apparently intended to allow the occupants to slide back and forth along its length.
On the desk in front of each stool lay a partial loop of metal with marble-sized beads on each end. Mark plopped onto one of the stools and picked up one of the loops, twisting it slowly in his hands. Heather followed suit, finding the loop very light and flexible, more of the translucent substance like what they had seen forming the tubes on the deck below.
“Hmm. Could be a headset,” Mark mumbled. “Here, let’s try them on and see.”
“Wait just a minute!” Jennifer said, her hand catching Mark’s before he could proceed. “Looking doesn’t mean punching every button or pulling every lever on this ship. Even if we keep this secret, we have to investigate in a way that doesn’t destroy the ship, or worse, us.”
Mark ignored her, sliding the band smoothly over his temples.
Stretching her own band gently, Heather slid it up over her head, exactly as she would her headphones. It settled naturally into place, elongating slightly so that the small balls on the end slid into position directly over her temples. The slight pressure actually felt nice.
Heather smiled. “These actually feel pretty good—like a temple massage. Come on, Jen. Try on a set. They don’t seem to do much else.”
“Yeah, Doc. They haven’t exactly killed us yet.” Mark grinned.
Jennifer reluctantly slid onto the stool next to Heather, then, after close examination, slid the band into place. Within a few seconds the tense look disappeared.
Jennifer smiled. “You’re right. They do feel good. I could almost take a nap if I wouldn’t fall off the stool doing it.”
Mark, leaned forward, letting his palms rest flat on the desktop in front of him, then straightened suddenly as a cry of surprise escaped his lips. Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as every neuron in her skull triggered simultaneously. She struggled to remove the headband, but found her limbs unresponsive. Every nerve in her body pulsed with an intense tingling as though all her limbs had fallen asleep and were now waking up with a vengeance.
She screamed, dimly aware that nearby her two friends screamed in accompaniment, the sounds barely registering in her overloaded brain. Although Heather had never dwelt on death, she had always assumed death would creep up on her suddenly when it came, taking her with it in a couple of ticks on the clock, perhaps preceded by a long fall off the rocks or the screech of car brakes.
Now death tore at her from the inside, and it was taking its sweet time.
When Heather was small, she had been badly shocked trying to get a bagel out of the toaster with a knife, but that had been an instantaneous trip into the land of nod. This endless eruption of every nerve ending in her brain held her here, unwilling to let her consciousness flee from the agony. For what seemed like an eternity there was only pain. Then, as if all her pain receptors had been seared out of existence, it faded, replaced by a flood of imagery, hallucinations that lacked the faintest connection with any reality she had ever known.
Three-dimensional symbols rolled past her as beings with large heads and skinny torsos darted about in all directions. They spoke at her. No, that wasn’t right. They thought at her, sending out the strange symbols that encapsulated those thoughts, and when she questioned them, her questions rolled out toward them as much simpler symbols that encapsulated each question. She understood none of it.
Shift. Gone were the beings and their symbols. She found herself strapped in a craft darting between the planets of a star system, the walls of the craft completely transparent, as if she was sitting in a large soap bubble. A ringed planet darted by, its many moons careening away as her ship banked so hard it seemed the gravitational strain would destroy it.
Then she saw it, flitting across her field of view, far ahead. It expanded in a magnified view, surrounded by circles and crosshairs as her ship attempted to establish a lock on the target.
The long cigar-shaped craft she chased suddenly sent out a spear-like vortex that rippled through the space separating them, a narrow tube in which the view of the stars beyond twisted and bent.
Heather’s ship torqued hard right and dropped, the ripple passing within a hundred meters of her. In response, a beam of solid red pulsed outward from her own ship, missing the cigar ship ahead, but pulverizing a small asteroid as they passed through a field thick with the spinning rocks.
Ahead, a blue planet with a single moon loomed large, the other ship racing toward it. Almost simultaneously, the weapon systems on the two ships fired again.
The red beam played across the other craft’s cigar-like surface, bubbling and warping parts of its hull as the enemy’s vortex beam punched through her own ship, sucking four small bodies out through the hole into the vacuum of space. All maneuvering control lost, Heather’s ship plunged onward, and the surface of the blue planet rose up to meet her.
The imagery stopped. Heather stumbled from the stool, pulling the alien band from its place on her head. The room spun around her, only gradually stopping as she sank to her knees. Beside her, Mark leaned against the wall, his own headset held tightly in his fist. Struggling to his feet, he held out a hand to help her up.
Heather’s eyes swept the room, panic threatening to rob her of her breath.
“Jennifer?”
Mark shook his head. “I already looked. She’s gone.”